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How LEGO Grew to Global Dominance

LEGO toys have captivated children and their parents for 80 years. But managing the enterprise has not always been fun and games. Professor Stefan H. Thomke explains the lessons behind a new case study on the company in this story by Maggie Starvish, which first appeared on the HBS Working Knowledge website.

Although it isn’t part of the admissions criteria, experience playing with LEGOs can come in handy at Harvard Business School.

When Stefan H. Thomke teaches his new case about the iconic toy company, he gives students eight-studded LEGO building bricks to figure out how many different ways they can be combined. Thomke’s experience goes back a long way—as a kid growing up in Germany he participated in a LEGO competition. As an adult, though, his interests lie more in the business behind the bricks. “When you’ve written many cases you have a gut feeling that one like this could be really great,” he says.

Thomke, the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration, wrote the case with Harvard Business School’s Jan W. Rivkin, the Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Business Administration, and Daniela Beyersdorfer, associate director of the HBS Europe Research Center.

LEGO explores how the company-one of the most profitable toymakers in the world-grew to global dominance from humble beginnings; the mistakes that led it near bankruptcy; and why one turnaround attempt failed while a second succeeded. LEGO executives were unusually supportive about the case-writing process, Thomke says. “We had access to everybody; they wanted the story to be told truthfully, with all the good and the bad.”

Building at the start

Part of that access included a visit to a wood craftsman’s workshop in the small town of Billund, Denmark, where LEGO began, in 1916. Carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen eventually shifted

TOKYO, JAPAN - AUGUST 09: Children build pieces of Lego bricks for a replica of Johannes Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' during an event in collaboration with the 'Masterpieces from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis' exhibition, which has been held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, at the Legoland Discovery Center Tokyo on August 9, 2012 in Tokyo, Japan. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

the business from making houses and furniture to crafting wooden toys. He based the name of his new venture on the Danish words for “play well” (and, as it turned out, the Latin words for “to assemble”). His motto “Only the best is good enough” would later be carved into a wooden plaque and hung in the workshop. These themes of good play and quality products were both bedrocks and touchstones for future generations of LEGO toy makers.

Godtfred Kirk Kristiansen represented the second generation, working alongside his father at age 12. The LEGO brick played with by kids and adults around the globe came into being during Godtfred’s tenure. He considered it a unique, sturdy, simple product—a system—that offered endless opportunities for creative fun, and drew up a list of product characteristics including “long hours of play” and “quality in every detail” that was distributed to everyone in the company.

Like his father, Godtfred paid careful attention to every aspect of the business, applying, for example, his knowledge of material science and production technology to the brick-manufacturing process. It’s because of these precise specifications that bricks made under his watch are interchangeable with those available today. Godtfred’s cautious nature extended all the way to the profit margins: he championed slow, steady growth. Because of this, it could take years for a new product to go to market. Green bricks, for instance, appeared in play sets only after a decadelong decision-making process-and the idea to include them came from Godtfred’s son (and third-generation toymaker), Kjeld.

The snail’s pace served the company well, as did the grandson of its founder. Under Kjeld’s management, product demand was so high at times that executives actually found themselves discussing ways to slow sales.

A shock to the system

That all changed in the early 1990s as seismic shifts pounded the toy market. Big Box toy discounters trampled mom-and-pops and lowered prices dramatically. Meanwhile, birth rates declined, children had less time to play and not much interest in toys that didn’t offer instant gratification. “These changes did not play well to our strengths,” observed current CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp in the case.

Serious jolts were also taking place in the LEGO Group. Out of work for a year following a serious illness in 1993, Kjeld appointed a five-person management team to help him run the company when he returned. The group focused mainly on driving growth. When a benchmarking study revealed LEGO’s global name recognition was on par with industry giants like Disney, the team started churning out new products and ideas to leverage the brand’s untapped value. A line of LEGO-branded children’s wear was created and a division of the LEGO Group was charged with pitching book, movie, and TV ideas. LEGO building sets became increasingly complex with more unique components.

While the number of LEGO-branded items grew, sales did not, and in 1998 the company suffered its first financial loss. “Their top-line growth was slowing down but their cost was accelerating, so they were starting to lose some significant money,” says Thomke. Danish turnaround expert Poul Plougmann was hired to reassemble LEGO and staunch the red ink. “He comes in and … does things by the book,” says Thomke. “He lays people off, he streamlines some things, he globalizes.” And yet the financial picture grew worse. “He’s basically going by the turnaround book, but it doesn’t work.” One continuing problem: the company’s growing complexity was choking it. Adding more bricks made products harder to assemble, forecasts harder to determine, and inventory harder to manage. Depending on the kit, there was either too much inventory, or no inventory at all, and restocking could take months.

“You had this multiplier effect of added complexity that went through the entire supply chain,” Thomke says.

The LEGO Group had also gotten too far away from the core values it had been building on for the better part of a century. The toy maker found itself needing to turn around its turnaround.

Outside the family

Enter Jørgen Knudstorp. He was just 35 years old when Kjeld promoted him from director of strategic development to CEO in 2004. (Kjeld retired that same year.) Like Plougmann, he

English: Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of LEGO (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

had no family ties to the company. Unlike Plougmann, his turnaround attempt succeeded.

Knudstorp’s slow, careful approach certainly contributed to that success; one of the first messages he communicated to the board was that saving LEGO Group would take time. It would also take re-engaging with customers, many of whom passed a love of LEGOs to their children while still connecting with the toys themselves. “One of the insights Jørgen had when he became CEO was that he needed to reconnect with the community [of loyal LEGO fans], one of the most powerful assets the company had,” says Thomke. “It was a huge part of the comeback.”

Knudstorp also worked hard to define the core business of the company. “How you work with, and experiment outside of, the core of your business is part of that balance,” explains Thomke.

Knudstorp recognized that innovation was part of that core, but he’d also seen the result of unconstrained creativity, so new product design began to be informed by market research, user feedback, and how well the toys matched the vision of quality creative play laid out by its founding fathers. Putting parameters on how people innovate had the paradoxical effect of making them better at it.

Reining in the creative process was part of a larger push by Knudstorp to reduce overall complexity within the organization. On the supply chain side, he did away with many of the unique brick components added during Plougmann’s tenure, and eventually decided to bring brick manufacturing back in-house to ensure quality control.

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